Chapter Thirty-One The Witch #2
She owed them that. The archivists had reared her, after all. They’d taught her how to be deferential. She thought of how often they had examined her, studying her pulse, her breath, her magic. Do you know your duty? Do you feel your tale? She’d always said yes.
But there was a smiling, masked face behind her eyes now. A ripple of knowing in her belly.
She needed to leave. She needed to run.
Instead, she clutched the mirror on its chain at her throat.
She drew upon her magic. Do not see me. Do not know me.
I am a shadow on the wall. I am nothing.
She held her breath, and waited until the two archivists agreed Meera would collect her.
They left the room, closing the door. They didn’t even glance at her.
One heartbeat. Two. Three. She counted, until she knew she couldn’t wait any longer, then let her magic fall away. Meera and Apollonius were as far away as she could hope. If she didn’t act now, they’d be back before she could.
She went into the room and walked to the book first; if she could not fix the book, then trying to save the girl unconscious on the chair would be useless, and worse, cruel. No one wanted false hope.
There was no time to brace herself. Only panic in her chest as she grabbed the ink in her hands. It writhed under her fingers, starry and painful with heat, but she did not let go. She held on tight.
She could snap the chains around The Laidly Wyrm in a breath, a moment. But there was something snarled in the chains beyond what she held now in her hands. She tightened her grip and reached out with her magic, curious and seeking.
They’re like roots, she realized. The chains ran deep, far beyond this book and this tale.
She closed her eyes and felt them with her hands and her magic alike, stretching from Aunt Meera’s office through the battlements, the defensive walls, into the central White Tower and the sea of incarnate books held within it.
Every book in the archive was bound—every single incarnate text and tome.
All those chains were like veins and arteries in one single body. They were connected.
She’d splintered chains once before. Small chains, on a small book. But if she reached out now with all her strength… perhaps she could break every single one. Perhaps she could pierce the archives through their very heart.
Her own heart was drumming in her ears. Panic. There was no time. She had to save Margaret.
She wrenched the shallow chains around The Laidly Wyrm. The chains splintered—tore, with a scream through her skull, and scattered like blood across the floor.
The Witch quickly shook her hand clean, pocketed the book, then whirled round to Margaret. She unbuckled the straps on Margaret, but Margaret didn’t move. Her face was pale as death.
“Margaret,” she said, slapping the girl lightly on the face. There wasn’t time for niceties. “Wake up. We need to go now!”
Margaret blearily opened her eyes as the Witch pulled the last buckle open. The girl sat up and said, “Witch? I… I feel lighter?”
“You should,” said the Witch. “Now get up. We’re escaping from here.”
They made it into the corridor.
“Witch.”
She stopped. Frozen, until somehow she made herself turn. Apollonius and Meera were standing at the exit from the tower, the night black behind them. “Calm yourself, Witch,” said Apollonius. “Why are you running?”
Beside her, Margaret was still as a hunted hare.
“You hurt her,” the Witch said flatly.
“You don’t understand at all, my dear,” Apollonius said soothingly.
“We’re helping her. We want to help you.
” He took a step forward, and the Witch flinched back.
“Why do you behave like this, Witch? We raised you, didn’t we?
Treated you well? You are flawed, and we have cared for you regardless. There’s no need for panic.”
“P-please,” Margaret whispered. Her hand, clammy with fear-sweat, gripped the Witch’s wrist.
It was Margaret that snapped the Witch from her frozen stupor. She looked around them. From here, there were no ways out to an easy courtyard exit, or even the Traitor’s Gate, with its way to the water. But she could climb to a window.
She gripped Margaret’s arm and bolted for the winding tower staircase upward.
There were yells behind her. She ran faster, on narrow steps, the walls closing in on her.
“Your tale makes you into a wyrm,” the Witch said, breathing raggedly as their footsteps thumped an erratic rhythm. “Can you choose to become one now? Fly to freedom?”
“N-no,” said Margaret. “I’ve never—I’m meant to be cursed into it. I can’t just make it happen!”
“Your tale lives in you,” she said. “You can change it, can’t you?”
“I can’t,” said Margaret tearily.
“You couldn’t before,” said the Witch. “But I think you can now. I cut those chains. That’s got to mean something.”
“Ch-chains?”
The Witch moved to speak—then swore, when she heard a dozen footsteps thudding on the stairs behind them.
“Faster!” she ordered.
“I can’t run faster,” Margaret said weakly. “They hurt me, I can’t…” Her voice trailed off, mouth opening in horror, as black mist roiled down the stairs around them.
The Witch first thought she was imagining it, but there it was still, rising around her feet, up to her knees. Panic clawed at her. Was this a new trap, a way to hold them both? But no: The black mist was coalescing into a shape.
A dozen birds, first. And all of them familiar. They all looked like ravens. Like—
“Adder?” she whispered.
They converged into one creature, one monster unlike anything she’d ever seen before, with far too many clawed legs and teeth and a tail that whipped like a beastly club. It was a creature entirely made of ink. Ink spilled from its body to the floor like blood.
It looked almost human, but with giant dimensions—vast clawed hands and bared teeth; a rictus of a face, like a scream. It panted, hot breath filling the air, uncannily and undeniably alive.
“Adder,” she whispered again. “Is it you?”
The creature, the monster, looked at her with a dim spark of recognition. It screamed.
She scrambled out of the way, barely avoiding its club of a tail as it threw itself at the archivists.
There were more screams, but human this time. The smell of blood.
One archivist pushed through the rest. A spool of ink hung from her hand, alive and writhing.
She flung it at the beast, and then two more senior archivists followed her, until the beast was screaming, thrashing in chains of ink.
It turned its head, and for a moment she saw its eyes turn small and liquid—the eyes of a gentle mouse, the eyes of her small friend.
Run, those eyes seemed to say.
The Witch did, wrenching Margaret along with her.
They were at the zenith of the turret. There were no candles lit, no torches. It was dark, and Simran crouched, heaving for breath. Margaret lay down on her side.
The Witch’s eyes were dry, her heart aching. They were trapped, and Adder was… Whatever Adder was, it could not help her any longer. And soon the archivists would do something to her, and she did not know what would become of her then.
“I just want to be myself,” whispered the Witch to herself, miserable.
“What a strange thing to say,” said the woman in her skull, the whisper that had followed her, “when I am you.”
“They changed me,” the Witch replied. “They stole me from my family. They stole me from myself.”
“Then why do you push me away?” the woman demanded. “Why don’t you want your own memories? Your own knowledge? Why are you happy to live as a puppet and a pawn to these fucking idiots who’re breaking the Isle apart for their beliefs?”
“Isn’t that what you did? Didn’t you break the Isle for your beliefs?”
“No,” said the woman, who was the Witch, who was herself. “I freed the Isle, and I freed us. Or tried to. But there’s still more to be done, and you could do it, if you’d just remember yourself.”
The Witch squeezed her eyes tight shut. She could hear footsteps thudding below them.
“Not yet,” she whispered, small. “Not yet.”
“Who are you talking to?” Margaret asked.
The Witch raised her head.
“No one,” she said. “Margaret, it’s not fair what I’m asking you. But if you can reach the magic inside you, the tale inside you, tell it you’ll only play your role if it helps you escape this place. And if it doesn’t, you’ll—”
“Jump from the window?” Margaret’s gaze was unflinching. Her hands were fists. “Because I will. I see my old self in my head, sometimes—she’s just an echo, but she’s so angry. With the archivists, with everything. I won’t let the archivists hurt me again. For her, and for me.”
The window was wide enough for both of them to wiggle awkwardly through it. The drop below was… very far, and met ground, not the welcome of water. The Witch met Margaret’s eyes.
“Tell your tale that if it won’t help you, I’ll pull you from the window,” said the Witch. “It’ll save you from the fall. The tale wants to live. If you die, it dies with you.”
“Are you sure it will?”
Of course she wasn’t.
“We’re both going to have to be sure,” said the Witch. “So that your tale doesn’t doubt us.”
They grasped hands.
“With me,” said the Witch. “Three, two…”
The Witch jumped, dragging Margaret with her.
The stillness lasted a second—perhaps not even that—before the air filled with the petrichor of the tale, and Margaret transformed into a wyrm, scaled and winged.
The Witch gripped on tight as the wyrm flailed in the air, dragging them toward the water instead of the hard earth.
They landed in water with a crash. The Witch let go, and began to swim.
They made it to the bank, on a narrow stretch of dirty sand, Margaret still serpentine.
“Go, if you can,” the Witch said hoarsely. “Fly to safety before your tale turns you back. Go home.”
Margaret hesitated, staring at the Witch with yellow, seeking eyes.
“I’ll be safe,” said the Witch. “I have work to do in London but you—you can be free. Free to shape your tale. Isadora would want that for you. Go, for her sake.”
With that, Margaret flew away. And the Witch clambered laboriously to her feet. She didn’t know who Isadora was. Her head ached. But none of that mattered right now. Right now, she was running, as far from the Tower as she could.